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Hard to believe, but IMO TechCrunch is a reliable source. The citations just come down to some Elon Musk tweets, but they seem more "serious" than his usual 3am crap.

I'd probably trust the story more if the actual CEO: Linda Yaccarino, said something about it. But if Elon Musk is pushing this idea, its likely to come to Twitter.

Looks like BlueSky and Threads are doing their damage.

Mastodon is pretty good too I hear :-)

Archived link: https://archive.is/Y6Oz5

Fidelity is one of the few companies who is publicly estimating the value of Twitter.

Fidelity is an owner of Twitter equity (one of the groups who kept their shares after Elon Musk bought the rest of the company). Since Fidelity is a financial firm, they try to estimate the value of their holdings.

> By the numbers: Fidelity believes that X is worth 71.5% less than at the time of purchase, according to a new disclosure that runs through the end of November 2023 (Fidelity revalues private shares on a one-month lag).

Given current events, its unfortunate to see Elon Musk taking the side of antisemitism and pushing white-replacement theory through his retweets. The timing can't be worse.

Just saving off this article for later. Sounds interesting, albeit Teslagenial. Lemme know if yall see any good quotes from this article!

Some amusing Twitter information.

With the $13B in loans, this means that Twitter's Enterprise Value is like $6B now, right? Or did I do the math wrong?

With Twitter moderation teams demolished from the Musk takeover, it is obvious to anyone watching current events that Twitter is the easiest place to spread misinformation.

I think we all knew the next major geopolitical event would have huge issues with regards to Twitter misinfo. So here it is. Let's hope Europe actually does something about it though

Not much else to say here.

Posters at Hacker News discovered this: Twitter is purposefully making some links slow. Anything going to New York Times (or other webpages that Elon Musk doesn't like) has a 5-second delay right now.

I don't think I've posted a Hydrogen topic around here yet.

Alternative-fuels are on-topic, if people aren't aware. Consider it like [Twitter] though, don't overwhelm the front page, we wanna keep a focus on Tesla. Hydrogen is certainly a competitor to EVs and is on topic, as long as we don't overwhelm the focus of this community.

Over on Reddit, ESGhound blogposts on SpaceX were a big hit.

This blogpost covers a number of permit-issues Elon has failed with regards to Twitter (the big flashing X sign) and SpaceX. Neither of these are surprising, but its always welcome for ESGhound to give a breakdown on just how much Elon messes these things up.

Saw this posted into !technology, but somehow the topic disappeared. We can have the discussion here instead.

@chakan2, is this how you ping people? Lol, I'm resurrecting your link in my /c/ommunity.

Archive.is: https://archive.is/C9daK

Twitter may have just had its worst weekend ever, technically speaking. In response to a series of server emergencies, Elon Musk, the Twitter owner and self-professed free-speech “absolutist,” decided to limit how many tweets people can view, and how they can view them. This was not your average fail whale. It was the social-media equivalent of Costco implementing a 10-items-or-fewer rule, or a 24-hour diner closing at 7 p.m.—a baffling, antithetical business decision for a platform that depends on engaging users (and showing them ads) as much as possible. It costs $44 billion to buy yourself a digital town square. Breaking it, however, is free.

First, Twitter set a policy requiring that web users log in to view tweets—immediately limiting the potential audience for any given post to people who have Twitter—and later, Musk announced limits to how many tweets users can consume in a day, purportedly to counter “extreme levels of data scraping & system manipulation.” Although these measures will supposedly be reversed, as others have been during Musk’s tenure, they amount to a sledgehammering of a platform that’s been quietly wasting away for months: Twitter is now literally unusable if you don’t have an account, or if you do have an account and access it a lot. It is the clearest sign yet that Musk does not have his platform under control—that he cannot deliver a consistently functional experience for what was once one of the most vibrant and important social networks on the planet.

The extreme, even illogical nature of these interventions led to some speculation: Is Twitter’s so-called rate limit a technical mistake that’s being passed off as an executive decision? Or is it the opposite: a daring gambit of 13-dimensional chess, whereby Musk is trying to plunge the company into bankruptcy and restructuring? The situation has made conspiracy theorists out of onlookers who can’t help but wonder whether Musk’s plan has been to slowly and steadily destroy the platform all along.

Such theories are compelling, but they all share a flaw, in that they presuppose both a rational actor and a plan. You may not find either here. I’ve reported on Musk for the past five years, speaking with dozens of employees in the process to try to understand his rationales. The takeaway is clear: His motivations are frequently not what they seem, and chaos is a given. His money and power command attention and his actions have far-reaching consequences, but his behavior is rarely befitting of his station.

Of course, many of his acolytes—especially those in Silicon Valley—have tended to believe that he has everything in hand. “It’s remarkable how many people who’ve never run any kind of company think they know how to run a tech company better than someone who’s run Tesla and SpaceX,” the investor Paul Graham tweeted in November, after Musk took over the social network. “In both those companies, people die if the software doesn’t work right. Do you really think he’s not up to managing a social network?” But it has been clear since the moment we got a glimpse into his phone that Musk’s purchase of Twitter was defined by impulse: It appears to have been triggered in part by getting his feelings hurt by the company’s previous CEO. The decision was rash enough that he tried three times to back out of it.

Musk’s management style at the platform has appeared equally unstrategic. After saddling the company with a mountain of debt to complete his acquisition in October, he decided to tweet baseless conspiracy theories and alienate advertisers; days before this incident, the marketing lead in charge of managing Twitter’s brand partnerships had resigned. Musk quickly unbanned Twitter’s most egregious rule breakers; fired most of the employees, including those in charge of technical duties; and bungled the rollout of Twitter’s paid-verification system. Compared with a year earlier, Twitter’s U.S. advertising revenue for the five weeks beginning April 1 was down 59 percent.

Recently, Musk’s public-facing strategy to turn his company around has been to continue tweeting thinly veiled conspiracy theories and sex jokes, cozy up to far-right politicians, hire a CEO who was initially contractually forbidden to negotiate with some of Twitter’s brand partners, and float fighting Mark Zuckerberg in a cage match. To date, Musk’s leadership has degraded the reliability of Twitter’s service, filled the platform with bigots and spam, and alienated many of its power users. But this weekend’s disasters are different. The decision to limit people’s ability to consume content on the platform is the rapid unscheduled disassembly of the never-ending, real-time feed of information that makes Twitter Twitter.

Read: Elon Musk’s text messages explain everything

His supporters are confused and, perhaps, starting to feel the cracks of cognitive dissonance. “Surely someone who can figure out how to build spaceships can figure out how to distinguish scrapers from legit users,” Graham—the same one who supported Musk in November—tweeted on Saturday. What reasonable answer could there be for an advertising company to drastically limit the time that potentially hundreds of millions of users can spend on its website? (Maybe this one: On Saturday, outside developers appeared to discover an unfixed bug in Twitter’s web app that was flooding the network’s own servers with self-requests, to the point that the platform couldn’t function—a problem likely compounded by Twitter’s skeleton crew of engineers. When I reached out for clarification, the company auto-responded with an email containing a poop emoji.)

All the money and trolling can’t hide what’s obvious to anyone who’s been paying attention to his Twitter tenure: Elon Musk is bad at this. His incompetence should unravel his image as a visionary, one whose ambitions extend as far as colonizing Mars. This reputation as a genius, more than his billions, is Musk’s real fortune; it masks the impetuousness he demonstrates so frequently on Twitter. But Musk has spent this currency recklessly. Who in their right mind would explore space with a man who can’t keep a website running?